It should be noted that this section is intended to introduce various aspects of art to the reader, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
In current connected home environment, more and more terminal devices are grouped together for a collaborative media presentation. By “collaborative media”, it means such media section is composed of multiple multimedia flows (e.g. video, animation, flash, music, photos, etc.) which have identical content or tight inner-relationship in both temporal and spatial sequences. For example, in a fashion show displayed on a TV screen, the content inside a region of interest selected by an end user will be presented on the screen of his/her mobile phone, with these two screens well synchronized during the whole period of program. The above case can be called a collaborative media presentation. In another example, a TV screen is divided into multiple areas for multi-view displaying for a football game—one full view for the whole stadium and one close view for an athlete from a different angle. In this case, a viewer can also transfer one part of the screen (e.g. close view for a sport star) into a personal tablet nearby while remaining the full view watching on TV screen. The same scenario can be deployed in a live broadcasting for F1 Grand Prix, a viewer can select the video flow captured by an internal camera installed on the helmet for driver's viewing experience, while enjoying the live game show simultaneously.
In the international application PCT/CN2010/000413 entitled “SCENE BASED TRICK MODE USING STORYBOOK”, Li Jun et al, filed on Mar. 31, 2010, a media distribution method for the synchronization of one terminal and the other terminal in a collaborative media presentation was described. In another international application PCT/CN2010/000201 entitled “VISUAL RHYTHM BASED MULTIMEDIA DISTRIBUTION IN CONNECTED HOME”, Chen Jian Feng et al, filed on Feb. 12, 2010, the transmission rate of collaborative contents with synchronization requirement was determined by the delay variation criteria depending on the visual rhythm of video content. In the above two applications, the transmission channel is regarded as reliable transmission path and packet loss seldom happens. That is, a packet loss is not considered. However, in a practical connected home environment, different kinds of access network may be deployed. For those access networks with wireless transmission such as WiFi, WiMAX or data interface by packet switch network for HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access), WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), LTE (Long Term Evolution), the packet loss is inevitable due to the error-prone characteristic of the wireless transmission channel.
In view of the above technical problem, some solutions were proposed to take the packet loss into consideration for the collaborative media. In the US patent application US2008/0192119 entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD OF MANAGING VIDEO CONTENT”, Zhi Li et al, filed on Feb. 14, 2007, a method is proposed to predict a quality of video content received at a set-top box and to determine whether the current transmission between a head end and the set-top box satisfies a performance requirement or not. The predicting method depends on the video quality model and the empirical video performance testing data, and wherein a threshold value is defined to provide an alerting when the network element does not meet the performance requirement. In the U.S. Pat. No. 7,676,591 entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TRANSFERRING MULTIPLE DATA CHANNELS”, Cheuk Chan et al, filed on Aug. 2, 2006, a method is proposed for fast playback switch between a first track and a second track. But in this patent the switch operation is triggered by an end user's transferring operation from one media source to another, instead of being determined by the internal device depending on the transmission video quality. In another U.S. Pat. No. 9,839,830 entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR WIRELESS PACEKT DATA CONTENT SWITCH”, Shridhar Krishnamurthy et al, filed on Apr. 19, 2001, a content switch system extracts one or more predetermined data fields from the radio packet data, with the objective of which is to allow data to be provided to wireless devices over various networks with different protocol specifications. In this patent, there is no requirement for the service relationship in upper layer.